“Tomorrow is May 1st. It takes place between 25 April and 2 June and is part of the triad of secular celebrations of the foundation of the Republic which find a resonance in our Constitution. April 25th marks the victory over Nazi-fascism made possible by the Resistance in history. Without the Resistance, the monarchy’s attempt to fully resume the sovereign role that it had had to share with fascism for twenty years could have been successful. And instead, as resonates in the second paragraph of the first article of the Constitution: «Sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercises it in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution». In turn, June 2nd reminds us that the passage of arms also corresponded to that of political conscience, with that referendum which threw the monarchy out of our history, which instead had a Statute, courtesy of the sovereign. It is the first paragraph of the first article of the Constitution that establishes it: “Italy is a democratic Republic”. But the sentence is not complete. It is completed on May 1st: «Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on work».
The very foundations of our model of civil coexistence lie in work. The first of May is a holiday for workers. We are not celebrating an anonymous “work” but women and men who do not live on income, nor on the work of others, but on the income that their own business provides them. It is not in the freedom of capital, in the free market but in living work, embodied in workers, that the very possibility of our republican democracy has been built and supported. It is in the awareness of the democratic, constitutive and constituent role of the workers, who did not allow the destruction of the means of production by the fleeing Nazi-fascists, that our Constitution is social and not liberal.
And then democracy cannot help but suffer from the attack brought on embodied work. The proliferation of contracts and types of working relationships that has deprived the working people of cohesion. The weakening of the role of male and female workers, following the demolition of the rights laboriously won during the twentieth century. The precariousness of lives has become the norm, where previously it was the exception, to give strength to the daily blackmail of employers. The financialization of the economy which gives precedence to bets on the presumed future value of goods and shares, over the creation of opportunities for income from real work.
For many, work is a condition that takes up all the available time without allowing for a dignified life; which does not give certainty of returning home due to the insecurity in which it takes place, starting from the journey to go to the workplace; which doesn’t really give you the opportunity to have the security of being able to keep a roof over your head and not find yourself, even if you work, without an address to which you can tie your identity; which makes one submit to any request coming from the boss or, more often, from someone on his behalf, under the constant threat of losing what comes from the work.
Tomorrow is May 1st and it is our celebration. Ravenna in the Municipality is partisan: it was created to represent only the popular classes, those who live from their work. Leaving the right to its own world, other political forces can practice defining themselves as left-wing and have as their foundation the overcoming of the differences between those who put in the work and those who put in the money. For us it is only possible to be on one side. On the side of those who work, of those who seek it, of those who have lost it, of those who have finally finished it, of those who are preparing for it. On the side of social justice, of parliamentary constitutional democracy, on the side of the people. On our side.”
